Kathmandu Mayor Balen Shah is a brutal tyrant-in-the-making

How a much-touted youth leader in Nepal is violently targeting the weakest and the most vulnerable people in the capital city in his gentrification drive.

(Here is a brief excuse for being absent without leave from THG for almost two months: a series of illnesses afflicting my elderly parents, including my father’s debilitating stroke. I hope to write more frequently to you from now onwards. -JK)

Balendra Shah is the mayor of Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. Currently about to complete three years in office, he enjoys a cult-like following and god-like reverence among a large section of Nepali middle class. His savvy social media strategy has convinced many in the country that he is the only one who can potentially deliver us to a better or even the best possible future.

So far as I know, he is the only Nepali politician to manage to get a glowing and near-hagiographical coverage in the New York Times.

Yet, as you will see for yourself in this post, the dark side of Shah’s governance is appalling and terrifying for the poor and the downtrodden living in Kathmandu.

Why should the non-Nepalis among you bother to know about his deeds? Well, some of you may love and worry about Nepalis. Others may empathize with the poor and the marginalized anywhere in the world.

But my main intent here in examining his brutality is to show how the cult-like status given by social media to the young and morally bankrupt politicians can poison democratic governance, hijack the genuine—and often existential—agenda and lead to a tyrannical rule for its own sake. And I think this helps us to understand the rise of similar politicians across the globe through elections in the rapidly changing media landscape driven by social media.

Why believe me when you can check his brutality for yourself? Please open this video (in Nepali) and go to the timestamp in the pinned comment (3:42) and endure the 90 seconds of assault to your conscience. Nepali speakers can, of course, watch the entire video.

Thumbnail reads ‘Capable leader or Nepal’s Hitler?’ with small images of two prominent people who respectively praised and excoriated him in those terms.

I have found Shah’s brutality towards the street vendors and the squatters unsettling ever since he started the brutal campaign to wipe them out from the capital city. But I desisted from writing about him because there were few instances of outright brutality captured by camera like the one I’ve used in this video. I happen to reside outside Kathmandu in Nepal, so it is hard for me to talk to the victims. If you write anything against the new Messiahs of the social media era without fool-proof evidence, you risk being literally lynched by the mob following the cult.

Kathmandu Metropolitan Police (KMP), which has gradually morphed into Shah’s vigilante militia force, has engaged in innumerable blatantly unlawful activities like confiscating property from the vendors, manhandling and beating them, assaulting people with certain physical appearance even when they are lawfully commuting in their bicycles, stealing carts stored inside the private property and even stealing the confiscated goods. But taping these activities is the last thing the victims can manage and good video evidence of the brutality is hard to come by. All of these have been documented by media either in text or in videos where the victims recollect the events with few momentary snapshots of the brutality here and there.

The latest act of ghastly violence, though, was different. As the militia-like KMP illegally stormed into a collection center for the recyclable trash in the city, the unarmed trash-collectors in the compound tried to resist them. The result was the vicious beating and kicking of the collectors of recyclable trash, some of which can be seen in the footage and reminds the viewer of a pack of hyenas attacking a prey.

What is more shocking than the violence itself is the reaction of Nepali society and the politicians including Shah’s purported rivals to the depredation: none. As he has the largest online presence in Nepal through social media he can command an army of trolls and brainwash a large number of voters for or against a politician in an election.

This is why the politicians of any color—both from the largely discredited traditional parties and those trying to replace them—would rather let Shah’s militia brutally attack and kill their own voters rather than speaking against him and drawing the ire of hundreds of thousands of his troll-ish devotees.

The conventional media do cover the incidents of brutality of KMP but their own foothold and impact are shrinking with the changing media landscape. They now have to compete with sensation-hungry self-made ‘journalists’ and influencers in Youtube and Facebook for a shrinking revenue pie to be generated from Nepal’s small and stunted economy.

There is thus little effective check and almost nil accountability when Shah oversteps his jurisdiction and his militia-like KMP resorts to illegal acts of violence and theft. In light of the sensationalist appeal of the demolitions that Shah carries in Kathmandu, his glorification is now one of the most easily saleable commodities in Nepal’s Youtube-Facebook-Tiktok marketplace. In a mind-numbing spin, you can find innumerable videos in Youtube where even the victims of Shah’s brutal assault seem to praise him, albeit in the thumbnails and titles only.

It is thus no wonder that he has been able to establish a dictator-like grip in the narrative about what his mayorship has done to the capital city. Especially, the elderly and the teenagers have been hypnotized by the spectacle he is creating around himself through imaginative PR and social media management.

In this context, I was surprised to get a disproportionately high number of positive comments in this video outrightly critical of Shah. Other than a couple of threats of beheading me for the criticism, very few people have come in Shah’s genuine defense even in X, the platform known for fiery altercations in matters like this. Some who have commented in his favor have resorted to flimsy arguments like why I have been targeting only him. While in reality, I have devoted nearly ten times more time and energy in trying to hold the mayor of my hometown accountable for her ecocidal ‘development’ agenda.

Where does this—corrupt and incompetent elderly leaders from traditional parties and ruthless, dictatorial youth leaders from new parties and movements—leave us as a democratic country?

I think there is something even more fundamental to worry about: how did we create this monster of a society where ‘civilized’ middle and upper class see the blatant and unlawful violence against the fellow impoverished citizens as necessary for a ‘developed’ society? How can a society so bereft of empathy and compassion even aspire to thrive? How does one rectify the collective conscience of such ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ people?

In the video, I conclude that Shah’s atrocities (yet) pale in comparison to the same committed by Hitler once he was in power in Germany. Thus it is a risky proposition to compare him with Hitler just yet. But the blatantly unconstitutional behavior that his militia-like KMP has been showing, and the impunity it has been enjoying resemble very much with those same traits of Germany’s Brown Shirts which was created a full 12 years before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.

If his cult and the unconstitutional use and abuse of power keeps growing at this rate, I see only a few obstacles between now and a future governed by a brutal, tyrannical ruler in Nepal. The parliamentary system is one such obstacle. Nepal’s exceptional diversity despite its small geographical size is another.

Ironically, Shah was born in Kathmandu but in a family from the plains-based Madheshi community that is routinely marginalized and disparaged by the majority hill people in Nepal. But he has mastered the macho nationalistic, chauvinistic and xenophobic language of the hill rulers and created a radical fan base there while brutally assaulting the hapless lower-class people from his own community.

I think it is the duty of all of us not hypnotized by his manipulative rhetoric to resist the indignity and injustice meted upon the fellow citizens and to fight for a just and inclusive democratic future. Despite the glowing coverage of his ‘accomplishments’ as Kathmandu mayor, his moves have led to deterioration—not improvement—in some of the city’s most intractable problems like waste (non) management.

His drive to gentrify the city by displacing the traders and the workers involved in recycling a large proportion of trash, for example, is going to badly exacerbate the waste problem in the city with terrible environmental consequences.

To all the Nepalis among readers of THG, please watch the entire video, comment and share it so that it reaches more people. Your role in ending impunity in Nepal is nearly as important as mine.